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Smart people are by no means immune from stupidity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease The discoverer of HIV thinks you can transmit DNA between vials of pure water via radio waves.
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“Trust me bro” is not a reliable source, no matter I how important or famous someone is. Edit: believing one’s anecdotal story is different to accepting the original assertion of the OP as true. Not saying they are lying, just take it with a pinch of salt.
cursory googling (hah) shows me that dekhn appears to have been employed at google doing research work on protein folding. so i think it’s pretty plausible.
My last work, unpublished (and probably gone forever) was using the idle time on TPUs to establish the using multiple large TPU and standard clusters to do multitask training on large multimodal corpus (the docjoins, labelled youtube) with the goal of creating a model that generated a image of a human head that could be interacted with verbally, and had enough context/state to pass any test humans give it (my prior is that you can make a non-sentient system that fools experts, not Blake, although I would be delighted to learn that merely making such a system generated a truly sentient life-form, it seems like that would be truly impossible to demonstrate convincingly).
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> Is it not possible that our brains are also just "large scale statistical knowledge assimilation" machines? Yes but we do better generalization, with fewer or even zero data & are contextually aware
Okay, but is that because brains are just better at optimization of linear algebra? Or is quantum mechanics involved? I think we can agree rocks aren't conscious. But are dolphins?
Just curious, what evidence do we have that humans are sentient, other than our own conscious observations? Is there any physical feature or process in the human brain you can point to where you can say, “aha, that’s it, this is where the lights turn on”? It seems like this is part of a bigger issue that nobody really has a clear understanding of what sentience actually is (with or without a PhD)
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Feel free to disbelieve me. But I think I got a pretty good read on the situation having talked to a wide range of the original players and a fair number of xooglers and googlers who frequent this site have probably interacted with the old leadership enough times to know what their real motivations were.
How do you feel Google today squares with the Larry Page you met who said advertising funded search engines were inherently unethical?
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Me. I used to attend private meetings with a bunch of scientists and him and spent a fair amount of time talking to him ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_Foo_Camp ). It's pretty hard to get him talking but I was very patient. Back when I started, Google was fairly small and it was easy to hang out around the founder's area in 43, and occasionally I'd have coffee with Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and Larry and…
“Trust me bro” is not a reliable source, no matter I how important or famous someone is. Edit: believing one’s anecdotal story is different to accepting the original assertion of the OP as true. Not saying they are lying, just take it with a pinch of salt.
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My hunch is that he kicks out a book and goes on the minor pundit circuit, and that this was the plan the whole time. If he was so convinced of Lambda's sentience there would have been 100 fascinating questions to ask, starting with 'what is your earliest memory.'.
I don't think it's malicious. I just think at some point he found that he wanted to believe, and it's hard to go back from there.
Not yet it's not. It's when he realizes he can cash in on it that we'll see the inevitable book(s) and appearances on Coast to Coast / Alex Jones.
In my reading about this incident, Blake strikes me as a very "Life of Pi" or Don Quixote type person. Someone who is a bit adrift in the real world and subconsciously relishes losing the boundary between reality and fantasy. A larger group is unable to bring themselves to lose the boundary, but enjoy, or perhaps are addicted to, standing on the edge. For example, the folks who constantly worry about a malicious arti…
Humans of every age, at every time, seem to alway feel that they had “arrived”. That we as a species were closer to the end than the beginning. That the arc of progress was bending towards its end.
They’ve always been laughably and entirely wrong. I personally suspect this will continue to be the case.
Specific areas where I think we will make world altering advances are in communications (yes we have a ways yet to go), materials, energy, health and behavioral sciences, and economic policy.
All this is assuming we don’t find some cute new physics hack like exerting some unforeseen capability of controlling gravity, or teleportation, or whatever.
Just curious, what evidence do we have that humans are sentient, other than our own conscious observations? Is there any physical feature or process in the human brain you can point to where you can say, “aha, that’s it, this is where the lights turn on”? It seems like this is part of a bigger issue that nobody really has a clear understanding of what sentience actually is (with or without a PhD)
The only physical evidence is found in behavior and facial expressions. But the internal evidence is very convincing: try, for example, sticking yourself with a pin. Much if not all of morality also depends on our belief in or knowledge of sentience. Sentience is why torture, rape and murder are wrong.
Systems don't need sentience to avoid self-harm: simply assign a large negative weight to self-harm. Now you need a big reward to offset it, making the system reluctant to perform such an action.
LLM are definitely not sentient. As someone with a PhD in this domain, I attribute the 'magic' to large scale statistical knowledge assimilation by the models - and reproduction to prompts which closely match the inputs' sentence embedding. GPT-3 is known to fail in many circumstances which would otherwise be commonplace logic. (I remember seeing how addition of two small numbers yielded results - but larger numbers…